Rep. says 'Liberals hate real Americans'

Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.) has conceded that he did tell a North Carolina crowd that "liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God," even though he initially denied making such a statement.

Now he says he didn’t mean it that way and he was just trying to rev up a campaign rally.

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“I genuinely did not recall making the statement and, after reading it, there is no doubt that it came out completely the wrong way. I actually was trying to work to keep the crowd as respectful as possible, so this is definitely not what I intended,” Hayes said in a statement for Politico.

The comments were first reported by the New York Observer. When Politico linked to the Observer story on Monday evening, Hayes' spokeswoman Amanda Little called and denied the report. Observer reporter Jason Horowitz told Politico he stood firmly behind the story. Politico left the quote in The Crypt blog but added the Hayes denial.

On Tuesday, two more reporters and two other witnesses confirmed the quote, but Little continued to deny it, calling the story "irresponsible journalism." Little said she had just as many sources who would deny it, including Hayes' staff and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who spoke before Hayes.

But then Politico obtained an audio file of the Hayes quote from radio reporter Lisa Miller of WFAE. Little backed down, saying that Hayes must have misspoken.

There was one small difference between the actual quote and the Observer quote. The Observer had missed that Hayes had included "and accomplish" in his comment, reporting it instead as, "liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God."

Hayes had been warming up a crowd at a rally in Concord when he made the remarks. Hayes set up his comment by saying that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate, was a "real American." McCain later appeared at the rally.

Before Hayes' comment, he had told the crowd, presumably as part of his effort to keep the audience respectful, that he wanted to "make sure we don't say something stupid, make sure we don't say something we don't mean."

Hayes' comment came the day after Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that the media should investigate which members of Congress are "anti-America" and which are "pro-America."

In Greensboro, N.C., Palin had said at a recent rally that "we believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation."

Hayes had followed Rep. Patrick McHenry, also a North Carolina Republican, who laid out the choice between McCain and Obama.

"It's like black and white," yelled someone from the crowd.

The quickness with which the controversy over the accuracy of the remarks was settled is an example of the changing nature of political campaign coverage. One source that Politico was able to use to confirm the comment came from a Twitter post stamped 10:41 a.m. Saturday by a reporter from The Daily Tar Heel. Another Politico reader said he heard the comment at about 10:30 a.m., independently confirming the timeline. Lisa Zagarali, a reporter with McClatchy, wrote in as well, saying, "I taped it. He said it."